Services.exe spikes CPU on net up/down

[red floyd]

I'd been playing around with various firewalls, seeing which I liked
the best. I decided against either of them (they both BSOD'ed on
me). Now, when I bring my network interface (or my company VPN
interface) up or down, SERVICES.EXE spikes the CPU at 100%.

The firewalls in question were COMODO and ZoneAlarm. I made sure to
uninstall the old one before trying the new one.

An in-place upgrade didn't fix the issue.

Has anyone seen behavior like this, or have any ideas on how to fix
this?

 

[f/fgeorge]

I'd been playing around with various firewalls, seeing which I liked
the best. I decided against either of them (they both BSOD'ed on
me). Now, when I bring my network interface (or my company VPN
interface) up or down, SERVICES.EXE spikes the CPU at 100%.

The firewalls in question were COMODO and ZoneAlarm. I made sure to
uninstall the old one before trying the new one.

An in-place upgrade didn't fix the issue.

Has anyone seen behavior like this, or have any ideas on how to fix
this?

Services.exe is just Windows way of saying something is running and
needs my resources but damned if I know what it is. If you scroll down
the list of programs that are running you shoud see several instances
of services.exe running at any given moment. Some will even come and
go depending on what you are doing at any given moment. It is a
program but Windows is unable to define it. Windows is downright
stupid sometimes, this sounds like one of them. There should be
several networking services that are set to automatic on your system.
These are probably those starting and stopping, depending on what you
are doing. Kind of like the print spooler starting up when you print
and then shutting down when you are done.

 

[red floyd]

I'd been playing around with various firewalls, seeing which I liked
the best. I decided against either of them (they both BSOD'ed on
me). Now, when I bring my network interface (or my company VPN
interface) up or down, SERVICES.EXE spikes the CPU at 100%.

The firewalls in question were COMODO and ZoneAlarm. I made sure to
uninstall the old one before trying the new one.

Found the problem(s).

1. COMODO had left some crap lying around even after I removed it. No
biggie, but the problem still remained.

After some more digging, I found the solution.

Windows is downright
stupid sometimes, this sounds like one of them. There should be
several networking services that are set to automatic on your system.
These are probably those starting and stopping, depending on what you
are doing.

This was exactly it. DNS Client Services was spiking the CPU.
Disabled it (I don't really need the DNS cache anyways), and CPU usage
dropped to normal when changing state of a network interface.

 

[f/fgeorge]

Found the problem(s).

1. COMODO had left some crap lying around even after I removed it. No
biggie, but the problem still remained.

After some more digging, I found the solution.



This was exactly it. DNS Client Services was spiking the CPU.
Disabled it (I don't really need the DNS cache anyways), and CPU usage
dropped to normal when changing state of a network interface.

Glad you found it, they can be a real bear to find sometimes!